I don’t understand what you’re saying here. SPAs aren’t circumventing web standards, like Flash — web standards are what make SPAs as they currently exist possible in the first place.
Indeed, the complaint is that the standards themselves have gotten too complex, such that only Google —with its obvious conflicts of interest — has the resources to develop a browser that complies with them.
Regarding the CV padding theory the explanation is more straights for me: it simply works better that what we had previously for enterprise software. It’s more relevant to compare SPA not to the WWW but to 90’s or 00’s corporate software.
Like what would you use for the typical CRUD with some analytics business app? The drawbacks of SPA are nothing compared to the universality of the web interface (“oh and it must work on my iPad too”) in the enterprise world.
Otherwise, the problems he s describing have 100% to do with the miserable culture of CV-padding that has taken over the silicon valley and led to SPA monstrosities, rather than with web standards themselves. WWW as a standard is OK, old websites work, and HTML/CSS is still there. Trying to make the DOM work as some kind of window rendering engine is a travesty that doesnt work.